How to Find Music to Play on Spotify

You can use the Spotify Search text box,located at the top-left of the Spotify window, to conduct a simple search of your Spotify content. Type in the name of an artist, song, or album name, and real-time results are displayed in a drop-down list as you type.

Search results are split into track, album, or artist categories. You can also view search results for playlists and users (your Facebook friends). Results are closely aligned to the tracks currently in your music Library (these tend to appear first).

When you start typing something in the search box, say "Michael," the drop-down box appears, and you get a Top Hit result, followed by top matches for the term Michael in tracks, playlists, artists, albums, and users.

From the drop-down list, select "Show all results" to see an overall list of search results as well as results split into Playlists, Artists, and Albums.

You can also get additional information about a track in the results screen: If you hover your mouse over the artist’s name in the Artist column, the name turns into a clickable link. Clicking this link takes you to the artist’s profile page.

On the Overview page that appears, you can see

A preview of the artist’s biography.

A list of related artists.

The artist’s Top Hits (which aren’t necessarily their greatest hits, but the most listened-to songs on Spotify).

A discography — their albums and singles, and other compilation albums they’ve appeared on.

Just scroll down to see the full discography listing.

From this view, you can click an album’s name to go to its individual page. An individual album’s listing looks similar to the following.

You can start playing the entire album from its main Spotify page just by double-clicking the first song. Spotify plays the tracks in order.